Pete DeBoer is here. What's next for the Dallas Stars now?
The Stars have a proven quality behind their bench. Is it enough?
The Dallas Stars finally announced their new head coach, Pete DeBoer – who signed a 4 year contract worth 17 million dollars in total. That’s a bold investment for a guy who has been sacked from his last 4 head coaching gigs in the NHL but it means one thing: Dallas wants to win and they prefer to do it sooner, rather than later.
Many fans, mostly on Twitter, were left in disarray and were already criticizing the move, because they wanted something fresh and colorful for the next coaching hire after some years of “Bowness hockey” which was arguably painful to watch at times.
Since the news about hiring DeBoer was brewing for a few days already, I spent it analyzing whether it was the right move for the organization and came up with this: I really don’t know.
Maybe more important than the actual hiring of Pete DeBoer would be the next steps he is about to make along with Jim Nill to make Stars a perennial contender for years to come. That should be the ultimate goal and the good news is that DeBoer’s teams usually contend and go rather deep in the playoffs.
Via Stars PR, in postseason play, DeBoer has led three different franchises to the Stanley Cup playoffs and has reached the Stanley Cup Final on two occasions, first with New Jersey (2012) and then with San Jose (2016). He owns a record of 68-55 in 123 postseason contests and since 2008-09, he ranks fifth in playoff wins and playoff games coached. During the 2021 Stanley Cup Playoffs, DeBoer became the first coach in League history to win his first five Game 7 appearances and has a record of 6-0 in Game 7 games.
That means the management group is really trying to leave nothing to an accident or chance. They know they could have a potential contender brewing thanks to very good drafting in recent years and want to make sure they have got the right guy behind the bench when that happens. Still, the same was said by the Vegas GM in 2019 when DeBoer replaced Gerard Gallant in Sin City.
Great coach should help players develop properly to better understand their roles and play to their strengths – that’s what’s called maximizing their potential. I think Pete DeBoer is a great coach, his career numbers prove that, so I’m expecting nothing less. The key here is to have a roster, whose potential at maximum is Stanley Cup worthy.
So how could the Stars get Pete DeBoer Stanley Cup worthy roster to work with?
I was advocating for taking the upcoming 2022-23 season as some sort of transitional year during which you try to integrate new talented players, potential stars, like Wyatt Johnston into the team. One step back, two steps forward principle.
By hiring DeBoer, Stars clearly show that they will definitely want to fight for the playoffs and don’t want to sacrifice any time period, focusing more on the actual on ice result rather than the process behind. Is the focus only on results the best way going forward?
You can compare it with the Colorado Avalanche and their tragic 2016-17 season. Yes, it was a historical setback – but they have kept believing in the process, had the GM and the coach on the same page for an extended period of time and it ultimately brought – you guessed it – the results.
As a GM, you need to analyze your roster and try to see it as objective as possible. You don’t want to have pink glasses because especially in the cap era, you need to maximize the cap potential of your roster for a selected period of time.
As of right now, the Stars have multiple underperforming contracts. It’s the thing you just don’t see in the perennial contenders. What is the worst contract of the Colorado Avalanche? Possibly Erik Johnson at 6 million AAV, but they offset that with having Devon Toews and Sam Girard signed for 9 million combined. Johnson is also a UFA after next season.
When it comes to the actual bang-for-buck, the well-known underperformers in Stars uniform are Jamie Benn, Esa Lindell, Radek Faksa and Ryan Suter. That’s more than 22 million in cap allocated to just 4 players who are playing below the expectations. You can also count Tyler Seguin’s deal in the equation but I’m ready to give him some more time, considering his injury and the emergence of players like Steven Stamkos or Patrice Bergeron in their 30s and reinventing their games.
You’d need a huge surplus of players playing on sweet-heart deals and ELCs to offset that and the Stars just don’t have that luxury anymore, with the likes of Jason Robertson and Jake Oettinger in need of a new deals. All of those four contracts expire in the summer of 2025. The good news is, you don’t need to wait for them to just expire, you can move or buy out some of them to alleviate the costs while you’re building the ultimate contender.
I hope the Stars will do just that. I believe that for maximizing the potential of the roster you currently have, you need to bring John Klingberg back. His game is really suited for the style Pete DeBoer prefers. If they let him walk after hiring a coach like DeBoer, it would seem pretty contradictory. Financially it’s possible. You could even offer Klingberg AAV around 7 million and still be fine, you just need to get rid of Anton Khudobin’s contract first.
There’s a space for even more drastic moves, like buying out the contract of Ryan Suter and bringing available right-handed defenseman like Ethan Bear from Carolina into the mix, but that’s probably just Armchair GM’s pipedream. But if Jim Nill’s a big lefty-righty guy as he proclaims, this is really the way to go.
The front office will probably want to hang on to Esa Lindell and they surely won’t want to move Heiskanen and Harley. That leaves Ryan Suter the odd man out. Fortunately, his buyout calculation is pretty cap friendly and Stars would save significant money until 2025 by doing that. 2.6 million next season and 2.9 million two seasons after that.
Starting 2025-26 the buyout would cost you 1.4 million in cap space, but that’s the year when the salary cap is projected to rise significantly. Just for this you need to really consider this move. The Stars current defense depth chart has an average age of 28 years and is looking something like this:
With just those three moves (trading Khudobin’s contract away, re-signing Klingberg and bringing in another RHD like Ethan Bear) it could look like this:
Pete DeBoer likes to activate his defensemen and let them carry the play. You be the judge which D-core is more capable of doing that, thus maximizing the potential of the coaching hire. That’s the job of the general manager, that’s why I really think the GM and the coach should think like one when assembling the team. Also, the average age of the roster without Suter and with Bear is only 25.5.
As far as forwards go, the key would be to integrate young offensive catalysts like Wyatt Johnston but even Riley Damiani or Mavrik Bourque at a pace that isn’t rushing the young players but is still helping them develop properly. Let Jacob Peterson and Thomas Harley be the examples of how it’s not done. Play to Denis Gurianov strengths and use Valeri Nichushkin as an example of what happens when you don’t do that.
Only DeBoer’s persona won’t make the Stars a more successful team. He really needs help from his GM to be the coach they hired him for. Yes, it could cost some more draft picks but that’s the luxury you can afford now, especially when hiring a coach for winning.
Don’t just hire a great coach and think that’s was the key thing that needs to be done to be successful, because it just isn’t. Continue to build upon that and act like you really want to be successful.
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